On September 5, 1957, Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, was first published.
On the journey, you may discover the meaning of life.
After Kerouac dropped out of Columbia University, he worked on sailing vessels before returning to New York to write. He mixed drinks, drugs, religion, and erotic escapades with “Beat Generation” figures Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Between 1948 and 1949, he enrolled at the New School for Social Research, where he attended Alfred Kazin’s classes on the visionary poet William Blake.
Between 1947 and 1950, Kerouac also was often drifting around, having adventures that end up as the substance of his book On the Road. In the novel, Kerouac describes the trips through the eyes of his alter ego Sal Paradise.
Disheartened after a divorce, Sal’s life changes when he meets Dean Moriarty, who is “tremendously excited with life.” Moriarty was a charismatic drifter who becomes something of a prophet of the value of every moment of life, especially those shared with friends. Sal begins to long for the freedom of the road, an aimless, but an adventurous journey with friends that could actually lead to the discovery of the meaning and real joy of life. “Somewhere along the line I knew there would be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
In a 1961 letter to a student looking back on his life on the road, Kerouac wrote, “Dean and I were embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.” The definition of “Beat,” used in the moniker of “The Beat Generation,” meant “beatific,” according to Kerouac. “For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak our, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out,” he wrote in “The Origins of the Beat Generation” published in Playboy in 1959. The Beats were pilgrims seeking to find religion in out-of-the-way places and peoples.
In July 1948, Sal, the alter ego of Kerouac in the book, sets off from his aunt’s house in Paterson, New Jersey with $50 (about $500 in today’s money) in his pocket. After traveling out to Colorado, he then shifts to California with a Mexican girlfriend. He joins her family in picking cotton but decides that’s not for him. Sal then hitchhikes his way to Times Square in New York City. Once there, he bums a quarter off a preacher. In December 1948, Sal celebrates Christmas with his relatives in Testament, Virginia.
Returning to New York, he and his friends then take off after the turn of the new year for New Orleans. Sal ends up alone on Market Street where he has visions of past lives, birth, and rebirth. Later, he and Dean meet Galatea, who tells Dean off: “You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your kicks.” Sal realizes she is right—Dean is the “HOLY GOOF.”
Sal later reflects as he sits on a river pier under a New Jersey night sky about the roads and lands of America that he has traveled, musing, “… I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
On the Road became a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation. Typed out on a continuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951 at 454 West 20th Street where Kerouac lived with his second wife Joan Haverty. Two years later, Kerouac made a serious investigation of Buddhism, reading Ashvagosa’s biography of Gautama Buddha and the Diamond Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism. He wrote a biography of Buddha titled Wake Up, which was never published. He did publish The Scripture of the Golden Eternity in 1960, pronouncing, “Everything’s alright, cats sleep.”
Check out Stephen Prothero’s “On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest” in The Harvard Theological Review, April 1991, 84, 2, 205-222.
